Afghanistan Revisited

Richard Holbrooke appeared with his staff at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington last night, talking about the “civilian surge” in Afghanistan. There were three hundred U.S. civilians in Afghanistan when the Obama Administration took office in January, Holbrooke said. By the end of this month, the number will have tripled: officials from the Department of Agriculture, the Agency for International Development, the State Department, and other government agencies, sent out on one-year tours after receiving a sort of pre-deployment training from the military in Atterbury, Indiana. “It’s the largest, fastest build-up we’ve ever had,” Holbrooke said. The numbers are still miniscule compared to the military build-up; even so, it’s fair to ask how much relevant expertise even the most motivated officials will bring to development efforts in Afghanistan. Over the past two decades, as the military has come to dominate America’s presence overseas and U.S. foreign policy itself, the institutional clout of State, U.S.A.I.D., and other civilian agencies has eroded. At the same time, private contractors with a short-term, for-profit mentality have taken over many tasks once performed by officials. The experience in Iraq exacerbated rather than reversed the erosion. The institutional learning that Iraq brought to the military has not taken hold across the rest of the government. Carrying out the civilian part of the counterinsurgency in Afghanistan over the next eighteen months will be at least as daunting as the military part of the fight, which gets far more attention. But whatever the Administration might claim or believe, this is nation-building.

Holbrooke called the nine weeks of recent White House meetings on the war “the most careful, detailed, methodical policy review I’ve ever been involved in.” The basic conclusion: “You can’t separate the Taliban from Al Qaeda at this point. Our judgment is that if the Taliban succeed in Afghanistan, they will bring back Al Qaeda with them,” as well as score an enormous psychological victory for extremists worldwide.

My sense is that the review didn’t change American policy. Its main function was to reach a decision about General McChrystal’s troop request, and more broadly, to subject the Administration’s own strategy to a rigorous examination and give the most senior officials complete ownership of it. Three things to keep in mind: once the U.S. government begins moving in a certain direction on as enormous and complex an undertaking as a war, it’s very difficult to change course more than a few degrees at a time—and that will be just as true eighteen months from now. Second, the fate of the undertaking will be shaped as much by how it’s implemented in the field—by those nine hundred civilians, and their counterparts in the military—as it is by the outcome of those meetings in the White House. And third, the most important actors in the drama are the ones who are often an afterthought in government meetings and media reports: the Afghans.